


She Moves In Mysterious Ways

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Crack, Multi, and having a complicated afterlife, no longer bangable, no longer human, people do have sex in this but it's not described in detail, still a disaster though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 11:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13410084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Thisshouldn'tbe how the Force works.Or: the one where Han Solo's Force ghost gets imbued into the Millenium Falcon.





	She Moves In Mysterious Ways

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cicak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/gifts).



> My first crackfic! I was not totally able to eradicate my usual owlish earnestness, but I had fun writing this and I hope you all have fun reading it.
> 
> The "Major Character Death" is the one from The Force Awakens, no new losses here.
> 
> This is for my girl Cicak because two bits of it came from her wonderful NSFW Stormpilot Friday prompt fills (it's not posted to the collection because that's not the primary ship, as it were, here) and because she's one of the people who showed me how much _fun_ fanfic can be. MISSED YOU BB, so glad you're back.

Han wakes up stiff, and echoing, and full of voices.

 _Shit,_ is his first thought, _that was a bad one,_ the nightmare, like the ones when things were getting out of hand with Ben the first time, when they were all still at home, and like the ones he had when they realized who “Kylo Ren” actually was. He knows he must have dreamed it because there's no burning, impossible pain through his chest.

There's also no chest.

He finds this out when he tries to take a deep breath, and nothing happens. Tries to move his limbs, to stretch, to flex his extremities, to blink, to swallow. Nothing. No answer from his body. No answer anywhere.

Instantly he's _then,_ carbonite congealing around him, that hideous moment between the black silence filling his mouth and settling on his eyelids and the hibernation protocols kicking in. Fully conscious, immobile, screaming without breath, without sound.

It subsides. Han's still conscious. He wants very much to panic again, to yell at someone, to get _out_ of this situation, but what _is_ the situation? Where is he? _What_ is he?

No body, yet the stiffness is real, effort in several places, things moving and working but not freely. Cold, with warmth and activity at his heart, or whatever he has now instead of a heart. A sense of being steered, directed. And faintly, a voice he knows.

“Chewie, _damn_ it, the starboard engine's cutting out again, can you give me more on the auxiliary thrusters? It's no good rescuing him if we can't get him help!” and that's one of the kids, the girl, speaking—somewhere _inside_ him?--and Han feels a sickening lurch and heave, followed by a return to a more even keel and an unmistakable sense of acceleration.

It's impossible.

But it's the only thing that makes sense.

For certain, very specific values of “sense.”

 _Well,_ he thinks, _I'll be a son of a gun._ And then: _I always said I'd fly with her forever if I could._ Followed by: _Okay, but seriously, you gotta be fucking kidding me._

 

*

 

Unsurprisingly, being a ship is a pain in the ass he no longer has.

Instead, he has—she has— _they_ have hydraulics, and power couplings, and catalytic converters. They have fuel cells and stabilizers and a nav computer that he wishes he'd had the chance to update before he died. If dead is what he is. He guesses it is. They have life support, air mixers and artificial grav and waste processors. They have the bed, the real bed, that he put in for him and Leia when it seemed like they'd be on the move for a while, and that he never used to sleep in when she wasn't onboard.

Actually, the bed is the least of his worries, because it has no moving parts. Rey wasn't wrong about the starboard engine, and the auxiliary thrusters need to rev for too long before kicking in. Some of the augmentations he put in all those years ago are sitting uneasily with the factory standard parts. The filters feel scant and sluggish, like an unsettled digestion; the blast doors in the hold don't have a tight seal; the relationship between the controls and the ship's motion is sometimes tenuous.

Han noticed some of this when he was flying them into Takodana and then again into Starkiller, but it was something to gripe about and compensate for, not something he had to feel and couldn't escape. When a gear slips, he tries to resettle it; nothing. When a bolt loosens, he tries to tighten it; nothing. He tries to _think_ it to the kid, on the off chance— _the ground wire on the alternator is frayed!--_ but nothing doing.

His ship senses aren't like his human ones. He can't exactly _see;_ it's more like he can feel, from motion and pressure and air currents, where people are. He comes to understand that the reason he can hear is that people's voices are vibrating his substance, however slightly. Hyperspace slips along the hull like greased lightning and the atmosphere, when they descend to land, feels like a friction burn.

He doesn't know where they are when they set down, because he hasn't figured out how to read the nav computer from, as it were, the inside. He can tell when Rey and Chewie power the engines down—he'd half expected to lose consciousness then, but it doesn't happen—and when the hatch depressurizes and they walk out, there's the faintest lightening of weight.

And he can tell when someone different walks on board, but not who it is, until he hears, “R2!” in a joyous, open tone, and he's _then,_ holding onto a golden-haired farmboy in an orange flight suit, stupid with relief and delight, hardly able to believe that both of them came out of this alive.

Only this time, that's not what happened.

 _C'mon,_ he thinks to Luke, who's having some sort of debate with the little astromech, _feel me, hear me, whatever, isn't that your job? Make with the mumbo jumbo, it's the least you can do after all these years!_ Luke gives no indication that he hears any of this, and after a while Han is forced to concede that he's probably not just being stubborn about it. Even worse, when the Falcon takes off again, he's not onboard.

After that things are a little fuzzy for a while, informationally speaking. Chewie is there, but quiet in a way that he only is when he knows you're committed to a bad idea. Han can't figure out why no one's done anything about the tiny life-forms that have apparently settled in every available cranny, and he can _feel_ the guano eating into the components. And then Rey gets in the escape pod for some reason—the pod isn't part of the Falcon's substance and Han is furious that he can't tell whether it's safe or not, even though he could feel her hauling it out and doing pre-checks—and then they cruise. He can't tell where anything outside is unless it's close enough to set off a proximity alarm. He has no idea what's happening, even when the Falcon shudders and wallows into action, when Rey comes onboard panting and overheated—the air practically quivers around her—and Chewie slams them to lightspeed.

They break atmo again and almost instantly Chewie's putting the Falcon through her paces, calling on her for every shred of maneuverability she has left. It's _amazing._ Han feels it the way he never did, never _could_ have, when he was piloting her. Good as that was, this feels the way he always dreamed flying would feel when he was a dirtbound kid, nothing at all between him and the motion itself.

Rey's in the gunner's chair, shooting at whoever they're shooting at, riding out the ship's motion. A dive, and the hull pops with brief crystalline impacts, debris maybe. The Falcon swoops, she veers, she lifts, and if Han could shout he'd be shouting with the glory of it.

Something must have changed again, because they're setting down and Rey's leaving the ship at a run. Then there's no new input for a while, nothing to feel except the various systems gurgling and sputtering and pinging and cooling to rest, and Chewie in the pilot's chair, picking at his fur as though he expected to find lice there.

The next thing that happens is that the Falcon's ramp pounds with feet and the Falcon's corridors and compartments fill up with voices, so many, he feels real panic, he's never tried to fly with this many, but he gathers from their snatches of conversation that he—that _she—_ is all they've got, so here they are.

And here Leia is.

He didn't recognize her step at first, because her step is slower. Her shape has changed and so has her voice, but he got to hear it a few days ago and so he recognizes it now when she greets Rey, when they hug each other tightly. Feels her pass Rey to the other kid, to Finn, and lean against the bulkhead, her palm creased and warm.

The engines power up again, everything in him or everything he's part of sloshing and groaning and grinding, all the bits and pieces and jury-rigs and baling-wire bypasses working together and doing their best in near-impossible conditions. Liftoff, but only just.

She's hauled heavier things than twenty-six mid-sized sentients and three droids each more irritating than the last; the strain is the result of all the fancy flying in atmo. Once they're out in the void, it's not going to be the weight that gets them. It'll be the life support.

What the _fuck_ do they think they're going to do.

 

*

 

What they do is make do. Which he supposes he can appreciate. Force knows he did enough of it himself, and in this very ship, over the years. They touch down often at anonymous stations and friendly moons, quick gulps of air and dollops of fuel and chances to stretch their legs, conversations—if he knows Leia—to generate and secure support, repairs that can't get made in vacuum.

Han likes the little mechanic, Rose. He can tell she's little because of the way everyone's voices roll straight over the top of her head. He can tell she's a mechanic, a _real_ mechanic, one of the galaxy's chosen, because once she's up from what he gathers was a bed of pain—these _stupid,_ self-sacrificing--

\--well, that's not the point. The point is that once she gets her hands on a screwdriver and his panels open, the changes she makes are changes he can feel. Sometimes it's like an analgesic stim kicking in, sometimes like a cramp working itself out, sometimes times like a cup of caf hitting the neurons.

Generally speaking, she handles the electronic and Rey the mechanical stuff. Han feels and hears the rhythm they fall into, hands and voices, coaxing the Falcon's best out of her, and getting to know each other, too, from what he can tell. Shy, efficient, eager.

The Falcon's working better, which means that the experience of being the late Han Solo, spirit trapped in her gears, is also improving. And gradually—because they're mostly just alighting and cruising again, flying casual and steering clear of conflict, and the question of who's sleeping with whom loses its piquancy pretty damn quick and conversations about strategy are boring and it's not like he can contribute if someone says or does something moronic—he starts wondering if maybe he can do a little more than he's been doing with the ship herself. Maybe he gave up too soon.

He experiments. Concentrate as he will on the position of a hose, for example, he still can't nudge it back into place. But if he goes smaller—

The first time he flicks away a microspeck of oxidation that, left in place, would spread, the first time he agitates the molecules on a housing to evaporate a droplet of moisture, he feels again like he's truly flying. More: like he's _useful_ again. He's so pleased with himself that he almost misses it when Rose and Rey lean together over the coolant pipe they've just taped shut and kiss.

 

*

 

These children are _insatiable._ Between him, Leia, Lando and Luke, he thought they'd fucked their way around the Falcon pretty thoroughly, but Han knows now that they only scratched the surface of what was possible. He doesn't particularly want to know, but he can't help it.

Every day it's something. Finn holds Rose on his shoulders against the cabin wall to eat her out, while Rose grips the overhead pipes hard enough that Han can feel it. Later the same day—the same day!--Rose yanks Rey into a maintenance crawlspace, tells her to keep her voice down, and works her over with a vibrator that's apparently and terrifyingly made out of spare parts. Young Dameron spends so much time on his knees that Han is surprised he remembers how to walk upright. There are other people who fool around too, but these four seem particularly determined to get bodily fluids on every inch of the ship.

Because there are so many people on board and they all have to be somewhere, there's no longer any space on the Falcon that will accommodate more than two people with any degree of privacy. That doesn't stop them from trying, with first one then another standing guard and the chambers of his, Han's...form? Consciousness?...filled with warm, alive squirming. He learns, because he overhears without any desire to do so, that Rose doesn't care to go down on people with dicks and that Finn likes his balls tugged on when he's about to come. But he also overhears Poe whispering to Finn, “I want you to fuck me, fuck me hard, make it hurt, I deserve it, tell me, give it to me, come on,” and Finn saying nothing at first, just holding him, stroking his back, breathing into his hair. Telling him, “Wait, okay, wait for a minute, just for a minute, I'll give it to you if you still want it then.” About forty seconds into the minute, Poe collapses in rough, heaving sobs, and Finn continues to hold him close, murmuring to him so quietly that even Han can't hear.

That's what he's jealous of. Not the orgasms, not even the forgetfulness. Just of being one with another. Just of being acknowledged, held, and known.

So he weaves himself deeper into the Falcon and what she can do, what they can do together. He has to let go of a lot of what he knew as her pilot—how to impose his will, the cajolery and the brute force. In an effort to avoid hearing the kids' sex noises, he spends hours, days, who knows, listening to the reactions in the catalytic converter. When Rey and Poe are making out slow and sloppy behind the hydraulics, Han withdraws his attention to the ignition systems.

And little by little, he learns what he can do to help the Falcon go where she wants to go, respond how she needs to respond. A nudge of fiber here, a smoothed connection there, and the bogginess in the controls for the horizontal stabilizers crisps right up. He can push dust clogs out of the filters a particle at at time. His efforts to spot-weld a pinpoint leak by heating the metal around it send Rose rocketing out of Finn's arms to seal off the hiss of compressed gasses, but the next time he tries it, it works. And the Falcon flies. They fly together.

He wonders if this is what having a twin is like. Someone you but not you, someone whose reactions you can anticipate and influence and yet couldn't possibly control. Someone who's always with you.

 

 

*

 

He's in orbit, waiting for planetary dawn to reach the next landing site before they descend. Poe and Rose are curled up in the cabin, she clinging behind him like a small and determined jetpack (after a vigorous session in the escape pod bay, and why did they even _have_ a strap-on? Was it in someone's go bag? Loaded as essential equipment? There's so much that Han wants to know and yet really, really doesn't.) They're fit in together with the rest of the night-shift sleepers like a New Harmonian knot puzzle. Finn and Rey are kissing in the pilot's chair in a way that's all too familiar, her knees on either side of his thighs, his hands at the nape of her neck. Her hands rise to cover his, then to undo the ties behind her head. Rey's hair falls down like a curtain, like a waterfall, like Leia's did.

Han can feel the whisper of it vibrating the air within him. He pulls his senses away from them and goes searching through himself till he finds Leia, sitting up and sitting alone, at the table where they used to play dejarik. She always handed him his ass. Now the table's turned off and she's holding her body straight, away from the ship's cold wall.

He tries to say her name. He tries to say, _I'm sorry. Leia, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I couldn't bring him home, I'm sorry I left you, sorry I'm no good, sorry I never was._ He tries to say, _Help me, I need your help._ All the things he didn't say when he was--

She can't hear him. In the ways that matter, the ways they understood each other best, he isn't here.

So Han concentrates on the seat under her, the wall behind her. Taps and rubs and caresses the molecules there, getting them to stir a little more, to move against each other within the substance of the metal, until the warmth reaches Leia through her cloak and her abstraction. She sighs a little and leans back into his wall's warm curve. It's the best he can do.

 


End file.
